the box seat. I never smoke, and I have, therefore,
no cigars to offer to the driver; I know
nothing of horses, and my conversational powers
are, therefore, too limited for a box-seat
passenger. My place is the knife-board; and there
I sit, watching those two intelligent eyes of every
passing household—the first-floor windows—not
offensively, I hope: not pryingly, I know: but
lazily, and, perhaps, reflectively, like a boy who
jolts into London from some pleasant country
road in summer, lying face downwards on a
carted bed of tares.

Prom this position I have seen you, fattest
of fat men, dweller in that old English
fourteenth-century house, with the pointed
roof, in one of the main thoroughfares. I
have watched you on a sultry June morning,
perhaps, before business hours, squeezed
through that small, overhanging first-floor window,
smokingthat heavy meerschaum pipe, whose
bowl hung dangling almost upon the hats of the
passers-by. I have gazed upon you as you leaned
forward, without any regard to the antique
building that sustained you, until I thought the
whole bulging fabric would have fallen, in
powdered feebleness, into the street. The small
low hutch, or shop, immediately under your
folded arms, in whose doorway a little child
could scarcely stand upright, has sunk in on one
side, like a hat that has been sat upon in a rail-
way carriage. Is it with the weight of your vast
bulk? for so it appears to me.

How often, too, have I seen you, rosy-
cheeked shopboy, standing upon the leaden
ledge of that shop to clean these first-floor win-
dows? Why is the little maid-of-all-work (and
no play) sent to clean the inside of the glass,
while you are polishing the outside? Is it out
of kindness, to give her some glimpses of
a holiday? Of course, the task is a long while
in hand, and many customers' parcels below
are waiting to be taken out; for window-
cleaning, by two such labourers, includes a
good deal of face-making and face-dodging
through the glass, besides a little romping and
flirtation. The wash-leather drops (quite
accidentally) into the street, and has to be picked up
by another boy, who enviously watches the whole
proceedings from the pavement below. Perhaps
he is a rival suitor for the hand of the young
Cinderella above, who looks upon him, with her nose
flattened against the window-pane. Crash goes
the glass, as a matter of course, and the timid
youth in the street decamps like a young deer.
Will the faithful swain on the shop-ledge
take the blame boldly upon himself, and be
haunted by a phantom tenpence which is alway
going to be stopped out of his wages?
Perhaps.

How many first-floor windows have I seen
that are covered with large effigies of teapots,
dustpans, and Wellington boots? Trade is a
wise, a profitable, and an honourable thing; but
it ought to be confined to the shop. If I took tea
in drawing-rooms over tea-warehouses, hard ware-
warehouses, and boot-warehouses, I should not
like to see the saadow of some great property

emblem of my entertainer's trade cast across
the table, while the substance obscured, at
once, the prospect and the light. Next to a
shark, or some other sea-monster, peeping into
my cabin porthole, I should object to a
gigantic dust-pan, or a body-bath, across my first-
floor window.

I have often passed by that large chapel-like
first-floor window over a tavern, and well I
know to what it leads. Long-room, or club-
room; faded piano in corner, horsehair seats all
round the wall; smell of beer and tobacco;
sawdust and sand; crossed pipes on tables;
canopy at the end (like the theatrical tent of
Richard the Third on Bosworth Field), the seat,
of the Perpetual Grand President of the United
Order of Provident Tipplers. Prudence is good
in fathers of families, especially when influencing
a taste for gin-and-water. There is something
dry and sepulchral about savings banks.
Nothing like a tavern fund, with a tavern treasurer,
and tavern conviviality over the periodical
payments to diminish the savings.

A short length of aristocratic by-street and
canaries swinging in cages, give place to window
conservatories, aquariums, small household jun-
jungles; pretty little boxes of imported nature
made to order in a pretty artificial manner, like
a waterfall at a public exhibition. All the life
in the street is shut out by shrubs in which
snakes may have crept, and through which no
vulgar, inquiring gaze can penetrate. No
matter. Pass on to the next.

A sulky, frowning individual is standing, with
his hands in his pockets, full between the snow-
flaked muslin curtains, lowering at the world.
There may be a skeleton of temper in this
particular house; but it is hardly wise to dance its
bony legs in public.

Take a lesson from your next-door neighbour,
whose feelings are soothed by playing upon the
harp; as he seems to tell us by displaying the
instrument so fully in the window. Past several
China jars, between rich ruby curtains; past
another conservatory, thinly planted, in which
the Hon. Mr. Romeo is paying his received
attentions to the Hon. Miss Juliet; and a sudden
turn of the vehicle plunges us amidst another
layer of first-floor windows.

Still the same sick paralysed child, whose bed
has been behind that curtain for so many years;
whose face never seems to grow any larger, and
who is always playing, in summer, with that
parched and sun-dried box of mignionette. Still
the same vacant, gaping empty rooms to let,
through which you can see the walls in the close
yards at the back. Still the same slovenly,
broken, lop-sided Venetian blinds, barely covering
the dirty windows, which open on rooms whose
picture it is not difficult to draw. Threads
upon the floor, saucepans upon the hearth-rugs,
kettles upon the tables, women in curl-papers in
the afternoon, and generally nothing but yellowness,
dirt, and rags. One change has come over
the first-floor windows of the street, and that is
where a new inhabitant—a refugee—sticking
up a board in his cheap apartments, announcing